Transience

Sat 4th Nov – Wed 29th Nov

Transience: Group exhibition by artists Amanda Seale, Melanie Swan and Sylvia Radford.

Transience presents the work of three artists who explore their experiences of impermanence and changeability through different mediums. Which includes textile installations by Amanda Seale and Melanie Swan, together with paintings by Sylvia Radford who, earlier this year, was selected for the Contemporary Art Collectors Emerging Artist Programme and awarded an Honourable Mention in the Contemporary Expressions Award 2023.  

The artists have worked together since they met in 2018 and exhibited together at Quay Arts in 2021 with their show ‘A Place to Call Home’.   

ARTIST STATEMENTS:

AMANDA SEALE

Process and textured making are intertwined within
Amanda Seale’s compositions as a textile, mixed-media
practitioner. Artistic and personal development is critical for the exploratory nature of her work. Amanda’s practice
combines rug tufting, art embroidery, weaving, and the
use of paint; leading her to continue to source, learn
and develop unique styles and techniques, whether
they be historic or nouveau. The breath of her interest in various mediums pushes Amanda to consistently refine her skills as a textile artist, helping shape individualistic and lasting quality in her finished pieces.

Amanda worked with Selfridges Oxford Street on their
Christmas Window 14 Commission, in collaboration
with Hillary Burns MBE August 2022. This consisted of
15 pieces of work, some of which feature hand
stitched detailed, applied direct to the willow along
side other gun and hand tufted panels. Amanda previously displayed at Quay Arts in our Clayden Gallery in 2021. The exhibition ‘A place to call Home’ explored her experience of place and culture through different materials.

Website: www.amandaseale.uk
Instagram: amanda_seale

MELANIE SWAN

Melanie works with historical and traditional mediums,
including making natural dyes, inks and painting with
egg tempera on wood and gesso panels.
The charcoal and pastel drawings she made for this
exhibition grew from half remembered places she’s
passed through; exploring the feelings they evoke
when visited in her dreams. In fleeting moments between sleep and awakening, memories rise, shift and change. The installation started from thinking about those moments and how to express them. She’s built experiences of the exhibition through line and colour, words spoken (thought or
overheard), which embed themselves in memory.
Melanie is recording each day in the Clayden Gallery,
using techniques of ‘off-loom’ weaving including
twining and wrapping, to mark the passage of time.

Website: www.studioswan.co.uk
Instagram: melanie.swan

SYLVIA RADFORD

Sylvia Radford is a figurative oil and mixed media
painter who captures the fleeting strangeness and
unreliability of childhood memory. Her work combines
disjointed imagery in an interplay between naturalism
and abstraction to explore themes of family
relationships, time, and memory, investigating her
shifting sense of identity. She assembles her work
deconstructing and reframing personal family
photographs to question how such images are seen and
interpreted. In her work, the bright and pastel
tonalities of her palette belie a disconnection in the
relationships between the figures, often presented as
ambivalent, theatrical enigmas. Partly autobiographical, the results are open to responses that are both personal and universal, inviting the viewers’ speculation. Her work reflects an archive, through which a hybrid identity is created revealing the complexity of contemporary experience. Her paintings evolve in series and become distanced from their source imagery, forging a new
comprehension of the surreal experience of
remembrance.

Born in Thailand, Sylvia, a British-Singaporean, grew
up and subsequently worked between South-East Asia
and the UK, and now lives in Chichester, West Sussex.
She has been selected for numerous awards in 2023,
including Contemporary Art Collectors’ Emerging
Artist Programme, Jackson’s Painting Prize and the
Women in Art Fair at the Mall Galleries; also with an
honourable mention in the Contemporary Expressions
Award, and longlisted for the British Contemporary
Painting Prize.

Website: www.sylviaradford.co.uk
Instagram: sylvia.radford

FREE ENTRY

Clayden Gallery

Monday – Sunday 9am to 5pm